A reputed hearing blogger compares Obama Barack’s “not black enough” to Dr. Jane Fernandes’ “not deaf enough” factor which prompted the Gallaudet protests of 2006.
Put beautifully, the blogger writes:
For some reason or another, Americans demand that people have concrete, divisible, political stances: either you’re for or against a particular political policy, mandate, proposal, or result. Americans, it seems, do not like people who are too ambiguous with their political ideals, and it might have something to do with a perception that if a person can’t take a political stance, then they somehow lack the courage and conviction to be [elected].
Was this the same driving pyschology behind the Gallaudet prostests?
He continues:
Barack would do well to learn from Fernandes and should start picking a racial stance and sticking with it until the end.
Would Fernandes have become Gallaudet’s 9th President if she had taken a stronger stance within the deaf community, rather than attempting to please everyone? Oddly enough, in Fernandes’ repeat backfires, she divided a cultural community dependent on being one in order to survive. In I.K.Jordan’s Hubris, he also developed, almost overnight, the knack to divide. The aforementioned blog overlooked for a moment the protesters’ utmost concern was that Fernandes lacked leadership. It was her 6 years as provost, and some years before as head of KDES, that the Gallaudet community (alumnus included) felt she failed to display the shimmering leadership needed to lead the University, and the whole deaf community, both domestic and international, into a shaky future. Leaders bring people together, rather than divide.
Short of Gallaudet’s moral collapse, Dr. Davila’s arrival seems surreal–timed with perfection–his Barack-style leadership and vision has shone a ray of hope upon Kendall Green. Look no further than “Team Gallaudet” for evidence.
3 Comments
wow, an amazing thought.
very good point. will need to soak that thinking in before commenting my two cents.
you should blog more often
I was thinking about this, too.
In one way, it illustrates the difference between physical deafness and cultural Deafness. Someone landing off a plane from Nairobi and gaining citizenship in America is not culturally African-American, even though they are 100% genetically African and an American. (Meanwhile , the average Black American has about 20% European genes, thus less African than the recent immigrant!)
Because they have not shared the unique cultural experience of The Middle Passage, Slavery, Emancipation, Jim Crow, Segregation, the Civil Rights Struggle and working through the history of various cultural phenomena of Black American Culture. But that does not make Obama “more white” or “less Black.”
I think the Deaf Community gives Obama the perfect analogy. He’s like a LATE-DEAFENED individual, or someone raised strictly Oralist, who late in life comes to embrace Deaf Culture.
He was raised in White Culture. (His father abandoned him at age 6, leaving him to be raised by his White mother and White maternal grandparents.) He got to take advantage of all the opportunites of White Culture that other Black Americans couldn’t. (Like a Deaf of Hearing who could speak and lip-read well.)
Yet, he understood the oppression of his fellow African-Americans, married an African-American, moved into a Black neighborhood and championed the community’s causes in the Illinois Senate and now in the US Senate.
To me, he not only demonstrates the difference between genetic and cultural being African American, but he also illustrates a kind of “Blackhood,” where people should discard the path of how you GOT THERE, and embrace the fact that YOU ARE THERE, which is the central message of Deafhood.
He wasn’t raised in White Cutlure. He was raised in Hawaiian Culture, which is a pretty different culture than White, although there are some parallels. Hawaii is a melting pot of all cultures, mostly Asian and White.
http://starbulletin.com/2007/02/08/news/story02.html